3 Novermber 2026
Pilkington was in Belgrade for the Serbian election. The polls had Vucic’s SNS party clearly ahead; the surprise was roughly 600,000 extra voters who don’t usually turn out—what he calls the “angry taxi driver” phenomenon.
The student-list coalition that surged is not a proper political party. It is a loose collection of people united mainly by dislike of Vucic. Roughly half look like standard Serbian nationalists; the other half are more liberal and pro-EU. They have almost nothing else in common. When it comes time to vote on actual issues in parliament, Pilkington expects pure chaos. SNS remains the largest real party. This is not the clean, Brussels-scripted handover some hoped for. Serbia has been trying to play the European game for decades and has largely concluded the EU does not want it.
North Macedonia has been a model applicant and still cannot get in. Why would Brussels suddenly embrace a country that could produce another awkward national figure?
Across the border in Hungary, the Magyar government has already discovered the limits of being the EU’s new favourite. During the election campaign there, there was interest and flattery from the EU. After the election the message from Brussels has been closer to “sit down and shut up—you’re a small Central European country.”
Public enthusiasm for the new government has faded quickly. Energy prices and the broader economic squeeze are about to bite harder. Attempts to rewrite constitutional rules to remove a president have already drawn the same “rule of law” accusations the previous government used to face, only now the accusers are the ones perpetrating these abuses of power.
Pilkington sees this as part of a wider pattern: the people who spent years lecturing others on norms are now discarding the pretence of liberalism when it suits them.
Poland’s recent episode with Tusk showed how quickly the air can go out of these efforts once someone like Nawrocki simply says no.
The deeper driver is economic. The inflation of the COVID-plus-Ukraine years exhausted the buffers for a large slice of the population. Prices did not come back down. Another round of rising fuel and living costs is stacking on top.
People notice. The more politically engaged among them are connecting the domestic pain to the foreign-policy choices of the globalist leadership class.
Pilkington’s blunt assessment is that the EU is watching a version of the Soviet collapse, except the current generation of Eurocrats still believes in the project. They have not yet reached the Gorbachev stage of quiet realism.
The facade is paper-thin—little Hungary under Orban already unnerved them—and attempts to force outcomes (whether in Poland, Hungary, or elsewhere) are draining credibility fast.
The risk is not a clean transition to something better, but prolonged chaos.
France and Germany illustrate the bind. France has run large deficits for decades and is functionally dependent on the ECB’s rolling support. Even if Marine Le Pen or a similar figure wins, Pilkington expects the chain to be yanked quickly, exactly as happened with Meloni in Italy.
Germany is different because it is too big to discipline the same way and has much lower debt. That is why Alice Weidel and the AfD matter: she is articulate, well-briefed on the economic and Ukraine problems, and faces less external leverage.
Banning or sidelining AfD may be tried, but recent failures elsewhere suggest the old playbook is wearing thin.
Zoom out and the pattern is familiar. The West accumulated enormous debts while Asia accumulated industry, liquidity, and production capacity.
Running chronic trade deficits is tolerable only if you maintain peaceful economic relationships with the creditors. Once you start treating those creditors as adversaries, the deficits become a vulnerability.
Ukraine is the clearest example of can-kicking: the war is kept going partly because the day after it ends the permanent bailout bill and the security mess become impossible to ignore for Euro-elites.
Living standards in much of Europe are already being quietly adjusted downward through inflation. How much social and political strain that produces is the open question.
Britain has so far avoided the scale of unrest seen in France or Germany, but the underlying pressures are not unique. The question remains: when will the riots come to Britain once ordinary people realise that their government is selling out their future safety and prosperity?
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